


Madman in a Box: The Inside Story of Donald Trump and the Truth Machine

by ErnieThePyle



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2019-01-01 00:16:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12144330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErnieThePyle/pseuds/ErnieThePyle
Summary: The truth can breed chaos, especially when your whole world is built on lies. And Donald Trump has told so many.





	Madman in a Box: The Inside Story of Donald Trump and the Truth Machine

The United States government’s balance sheet shows more than $3.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars spent last fiscal year, spread across the military, social security, Medicare and everything else. But what that balance sheet doesn’t show, what it doesn’t acknowledge, is a tiny sliver of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, an island that according to all government records, all agency reports, all possible sources of information, shouldn’t exist.

On this little patch of wind-swept and rain-soaked and thoroughly storm-sick land that doesn’t exist, there is a building. Just one, a massive structure that spans nearly the entire length of the three-and-a-half mile island. The only other feature of the otherwise barren patch of rock is a mile-long airstrip that runs parallel to the structure. At the far end of that airstrip, just off the breakwaters, on a bright and breezy day last October, there sat a blue box that no one seemed to pay much mind. But we’ll get to that later.

On this particular day, all eyes were not on the end of the airway. They were on the sky. And on a plane the island had never seen before and likely never will again. President Donald Trump had only even learned two days before about the place that base personnel have come to not-so-affectionately call The Styx. Someone at some point had apparently been a fan of Greek mythology, particularly the legend of the River Styx that wayward souls crossed on their road from the land of the living to the realm of the dead.

The president knew nothing about the mythology or the name when he touched down on the island that day. To him, it was little more than a random assortment of numbers and letters that give the island its only official name, an alphanumeric that changes to a new preset every three days. A preset that never repeats. 

On that day, there was a strange man waiting on the runway amongst the huddled crowd of startled onlookers, watching as Air Force One came to a rumbling thud of a landing on the airstrip. No one would notice him for a while, despite the eagle-eyed military personnel and the best surveillance equipment that money that’s never been appropriated, or signed for, can buy. When they did eventually notice him, they’d see a tall, thin man in a sharp brown jacket and a bow tie, with a shock of soft brown hair, a bulging knife of a chin and eyes that no one can adequately describe, no matter how many I’ve talked to. “Midnight,” said one, “eternity,” said another. 

No one had yet noticed those eyes when Trump stepped off the plane, when Anna Dudin realized just how deep her troubles ran. Dudin was, and still is, a brilliant scientific administrator with PhD’s in astrophysics, psychology and mathematics. She was, but is no longer, the head of the island that doesn’t exist, still staffed by government employees no human resources department has ever recognized. 

Even now, no one would have ever heard about The Styx if it weren’t for the events that would transpire on that October day. But here, now, through six months of research and interviews with more than four dozen witnesses, including Dudin herself, we can piece together the meeting of the madman. 

Dudin and others describe a palpable look of fury on Trump’s face as he descended the stairs. He was already screaming when Dudin approached to reach out her hand. 

“What the hell am I doing here!?” Dudin recalls the president belting out.

Dudin had been startled. She wasn’t much used to dealing with top brass, save for short conversations in darkened video teleconference rooms where she felt safe telling the demanding voices to leave science to the scientists and blowing things up to the rest. She’d barely even been aware of who the president was until she’d made the call. Had barely understood the rage of a man so accustomed to lies when made to tell the truth.

“Sir…”

“It’s Mr. President to you!” Trump bellowed.

“Mr. President, we--” But Trump waved her off with a swipe of his hand that nearly swatted Dudin in the eye. 

“I’m a smart guy. I don’t need explanations,” Trump said. “Just show it to me.”

So Dudin turned on her heels, her gaze sweeping past the rows of so-many sets of bewildered eyes, all startled and self-conscious, save perhaps, for one. She launched herself towards the building that towered over the island and the plane and the people. Trump, Dudin and others recall, never really stopped screaming as he followed her to the building, shouting alternatively about how smart he was and how much of a distraction coming here, to this place, was from the good work of Making America Great Again. 

Trump was impatient to get through layers upon layers of building security that rivals the most paranoid of nuclear silos. But it couldn’t be helped. The voice checks and passcodes, the retina scans and the bomb-sniffing equipment, are all hard-baked into the building that has no name. At a few intervals the president screamed at staff who didn’t salute him, only to be gently reminded that rank doesn’t carry quite the same weight here. 

Dudin says she tried at a few points to explain the science that permeated every corner of the building, but the president wasn’t having any of it. And he certainly wasn’t listening. So she mouthed something about the cafeteria being where they studied the psychology and physiology of manners. 

And then they were through security. And down the sterile hallways and past the painfully-white walls and astride the rooms that have a purpose no one is supposed to know. And then they were before the great big steel door at the end of the great long hallway, having passed through an outer doorway 200 feet prior that was flanked by not less than four armed guards and signs warning that all unauthorized personnel will be shot on sight. 

“Is this it?” Trump asked in front of the inner, gleaming-titanium door. 

“Yes, Mr. President,” Dudin responded. The president stared at her as she fiddled with her passkey and pressed her fingers to the last ident-board, the one that pricks you every single time, not just to check your blood but to count how many times before you’ve been pricked in that exact same spot. Dudin thinks at that point it was prick number 54. But it could have been 55. Each time, she recalls, it stings, but she tried not to flinch underneath the president’s gaze. 

As Dudin worked the controls, Trump’s eyes wandered.

“Where’d everybody go?” He demanded, apparently realizing for the first time that they were alone.

“I told you, Mr. President, you need Alpha-X level clearance for this room.”

Dudin recalls Trump fidgeting briefly at the revelation. But then the titanium door was opening with a low hissing noise and she was ushering the president into the room beyond. 

It’s a great long room inside, dizzyingly wide and blindingly lit. Running the length, exactly aligned to the length of the Styx building, which is in turn exactly aligned with the line of longitude running from the North Pole to the South, was an object that even Dudin herself has trouble describing. She usually just calls it the Strand, describing a long blue line of energy and light that isn’t quite there, but is at the same time somehow the most real and anchored thing your eyes have ever held.

“So that’s it?”

“We think so, Mr. President.”

Trump whirled again on Dudin and she was reminded how alone she was with the man, save for the lights and the long blue… thing. “What do you mean, you think so? Is this it or not?”

Dudin probably rubbed at her arm under that glare, just above her elbow. It’s a frequent physical tic she seems to adopt anytime she’s pressed for uncomfortable details. “As I said on the video conference yesterday, our information is incomplete. But based on the readings we took and the way the event spread, we are reasonably confident that this is what caused the… truth-telling.”

“Truth-telling my ass!” the president thundered. “I was doing a live interview on Fox, great people, and all of a sudden they asked me about my voting investigation. And somehow, I actually repeated the horrible lie that I lost the popular vote! That three million stupid voting wetbacks didn’t illegally try and steal my bigly historical victory, the greatest anyone’s ever seen. So many people have told me that.”

The administrator could only nod. That revelation, at least, had made its way through to the Styx. That Donald Trump had perhaps for the first time in his life told the fullest and most ugly truth of his inner mind. That he’d admitted his bigotry and his lies and his egotistic paranoia on national television, for exactly 48 seconds. 

Those long seconds have since become perhaps the defining moment of Trump’s nascent presidency, one he’s struggled to recover from more than nearly any other stumble or setback. 

The Fox interviewer hadn’t even asked what journalists might consider to be a tough question, just a passing reference to the investigation Trump launched amid consternation about just how close his eked-out victory had been. All the reporter wanted to know was if the investigation was going well, if updates would be forthcoming. 

Watching the video now, it’s apparent the exact moment when Trump started telling the truth, when, as we now know, the Strand effect took hold. His eyes shift just slightly, his jaw sets, his facial muscles unpucker, the tone in his voice shifts from an effort at authority to one of near-apology, and his words just start spilling out.

“You wouldn’t believe the money we’ve blown looking for wetbacks who don’t exist, believe me,” the president had said. “We’ll keep looking but anyways, you know the money you’d need to pull off even a real small vote of illegals. Three-million! There’s no evidence. None. But I need the love, all those people need to love me, and I need to lie about it.”

Trump’s advisors have tried to say he was joking, or that he was reflecting ironically on criticism levelled at the president. But most have treated the moment for what it was, the complete and unabashed truth. Without the ability to lie or hold back. 

And Trump hadn’t been alone. Which is why the president was there on that little island, days later. And it’s why the Styx is no longer just a river in Greek mythology and a tiny line in the Pacific Ocean not visible on any map or satellite photo. 

At last count, when Trump landed that day, researchers had tabulated 38,236 verified reports of people suddenly telling the complete and unblemished truth for the exact same length of time as Trump’s own slip; people unable to lie in parole hearings and doctor’s appointments, in job interviews and “massage parlors,” first dates and last. As near as researchers could tell, what’s since come to be called the Veritas Phenomenon had been a worldwide event. And just as near as Styx analysts could tell, it was linked back to the long blue ribbon of energy before Trump and Dudin. 

Dudin tried to explain all of that to Trump. Tried to explain that they’d been studying the ribbon for nearly 40 years, had built this island and everything on it around the line of light after it had been discovered and after initial tests in psychic energy seemed to pick up vast mental energies flowing off it. She tried telling Trump that nothing like this had ever happened before, that they’d taken extensive measures to keep those psychic energies bottled up, and what’s the harm with a little bit of truth?

“And what did all that get you?” Trump said. “Nothing!”

“I wouldn’t say that Mr. President. We’ve learned a great deal more about the ribbon. We think the data we gleaned from the incident actually got us to the point we’ve been working towards for 40 years, where we could really begin to understand it. Maybe even use it.”

“How do you blow it up?” was all Trump replied.

“I beg your pardon?”

Dudin recalls the president waving his hands further, at her, at the air around them, at the Strand. 

“How’d you kill it?” the president said breathlessly. “How do you make it go away?”

At this point Dudin knows she rubbed her arm above the elbow. She recalls squeezing it hard under the president’s gaze. 

“I don’t know that we can,” she told the president. “Or that we’d want to.”

“You want to do and you’re going to,” Trump replied. “You’re gonna find a way to blow it up. It’s a bad hombre and I want it gone.” 

Dudin says she had a reply ready on the tip of her tongue. It was about the ribbon’s importance to science. About the unpredictability of even attempting to harm or otherwise disrupt a two mile long piece of psychic energy. About its value versus the comfort of a petty lie. But she never got a chance to speak.

“Technically, it’s a toy,” said a voice, with an English accent and what Dudin recalls as a fleck of pompous arrogance.

Trump and Dudin both whirled on the voice in the most secure room in one of the most secure buildings in one of the most unknown facilities in the world. And there was the man, the man with the forever eyes and the brown hair and the bowtie, and above all, a look of smug and ancient joy itching across his features.

Dudin recalls that Trump was the first to stir from the shock of the intrusion. “Who the hell are you!?”

The man extended his hand, a lever movement that twisted from his shoulder, his arm jerking up in one smooth, unbroken line towards Dudin. “Hello,” he replied with a wry smile. “I’m the Doctor.”

\--

“Doctor? Doctor Who?” Trump bellowed. Dudin recalls the president staring at her and this newcomer with a face of outrage, and that’s before she realized this man had tried first to shake her hand, not that of the president, even as she found her palm clasped in the Doctor’s two-handed grip. 

She looked deep into those eyes as he shook her hand with both of his, an enthusiastic grin taking her in. 

“You must be in charge here,” the Doctor said. “That coat just says for all the world, ‘I’m in charge here,’” he said, one hand coming up from hers to wave outward, as if framing the air before them. “And don’t you forget it.”

In another moment the grip was broken and Trump advanced on the thin man in the brown tweed jacket and the bold bowtie, but the Doctor stood fast, smiling all the while.

“Do you know who I am?” Trump said, ever more anger edging into his voice. 

To Dudin’s eyes, the Doctor looked puzzled for a heartbeat before his fingers snapped before his face as his smile widened. “Of course!” the Doctor replied. “You’re that opera singer, right? Paganini?” 

“I am the…”

“No, no, no, that’s not right at all,” the Doctor said, briskly cutting off a man famous for being the loudest in every room. Dudin says she’s still trying to figure out how Trump was so easily silenced.

“You’re…” the Doctor began, his hand rubbing thoughtfully at the cutting chin, “that comedian! The really obnoxious one.”

Dudin watched in shock as the Doctor rubbed his chin even more, musing to Trump’s increasingly impotent rage and cutoff protestations about who the president might be. Everyone from gas station attendants to lottery winners and failed faith healers were mentioned. But after a few moments the Doctor brushed off the conversation, apparently giving up. 

“I’ll figure it out later,” he eventually said. 

“Now, looks like you have a bit of a problem. Perfect photo veris right? On a sigma-wave inverted to the basic human psychic field? And I’ll just bet it’s throwing off 15.48c static bolts like one of those street musicians with the... oh that’s right,” he said, turning again to Trump. “Like a harmonica. You’re that harmonica player!”

Trump opened his mouth to protest yet again only to be succinctly silenced once more. “No, you’ve got all the wrong lips and entirely too-small hands to play it right,” the Doctor said. “But you,” he continued, turning once more to Dudin. “Your hands are just right. What was your instrument? I’ll just bet you were a bassoon player.”

Dudin thinks she nodded slowly as she recalled the five years of lessons she’d taken as a girl. “How did you know that?” she asked.

“Oh it’s written all over your face. Just like this one,” the Doctor said as he motioned to the president, “likes burnt and burning things. You should broaden your pallet; I just bet you’d love fish fingers and custard. But we were talking about the bassoon weren’t we.”

And the Doctor was sweeping forward before either Dudin or the president could respond. Dudin followed a few paces behind him, wondering if she should try to stop this stranger from approaching the Strand.

“And like all instruments,” the Doctor said, “this one needs a frequency and it needs an audience, just like mimes. Only everyone was listening, weren’t you, you big, blue wavy line you.” 

That list bit, Dudin recalls, was clearly speaking directly to the Strand. It was enough, as the Doctor scrutinized the object, his head twisting atop his shoulders, for her voice to finally find itself again. 

“Are you, talking to the Strand?” she recalls asking. “And how do you know the exact amount of energy it’s putting out, down to the decimal?”

The Doctor twisted backwards to look at Dudin, his feet still planted in the direction of the Strand. “Oh that,” he replied, “I actually left out a few digits. Maybe 12 places more. But yes, I was talking to it, although Strand might be a little too on the nose. It’s a Soothsis.”

“Soo, Soothsis?”

“Oh come now. You’ve never heard of a Soothsis?” Now, Dudin recalls, the Doctor was turning towards her fully once again. “Bah, humans. You really need to get out more. A Soothsis,” he said, again turning back to the line of light, “is a kind of lie detector, operating on a transverse light frequency timed to the exact firing speed of the biologic synapse.” 

At this point I suppose I should interject myself directly into the conversation, and the wibbly-wobbly sciencey words these characters seem to be bantering about. Dudin and other high-level Styx scientists, all with resumes longer and more impressive than my arm, assure me they only sound made-up. 

But Trump, it seems, needed direct assurances.

“What is this nonsense?” thundered the president who’d not yet been recognized as such. “Tell me right now who you are and what the hell is this thing. Now!”

Dudin recalls catching the Doctor blinking for a few seconds before responding. “You’d know if you’d been listening. But well, what can you expect from a hairdresser who can’t dress his own hair.”

“I am not a…” but the words were drowned out, leaving Trump to scream with nothing but his purpling face. 

“Shh now, the adults are talking,” the Doctor said in a clipped, briefly and profoundly authoritative tone that surprised Dudin only the first time she heard it. “This… well a Soothsis is really just a generic term for quite a few creations of a race called the Soothsen. The Soothsen were a race of, well I’d say to a man but they hated gender references, they were a bunch of master liars.”

At this point, according to Dudin, the Doctor began to walk around the Strand, motioning at it in clipped bursts of movement. 

“They found the truth boring. Wanted nothing but to test each other, trained from birth to always be looking through the bluster built up around yourself. They were so very good at it, telling each other about buried treasures and failed romances, and sometimes successful ones. And when you like to lie, when it’s all you do…”

“Sometimes you just want to hear the truth,” Dudin interjected. 

There was a brief snap of the Doctor’s fingers as he replied, a particular smile jumping into his features. “Exactly!” he said. “They created Soothsis to force the truth out of each another. Though they usually put out only localized veritas fields, and I’ve certainly never seen one of this size or putting out this scale or power of effect. It’s something else entirely.”

Dudin says she rubbed at her arm once again. “But,” she began, “I thought you said you knew what this was.”

“Oh I do,” the Doctor said. “Mostly. It IS a Soothsis. It’s just… well a race of liars tend to be bigger control freaks than I would have expected to make something so big and blue and unwieldy.” 

The Doctor produced from his jacket a long, thin device Dudin at first thought was a flashlight. It even glowed. But she’d never heard a flashlight make that kind of a sound, and the light it produced was minimal.

“What is that thing?” she asked.

“This?” the Doctor replied, tilting the little device in the air towards Dudin. “This is my sonic screwdriver. But really it’s my third midlife crisis and my girl-problem forgetter wrapped in one, plus I have a real thing for stuff that goes ding and makes noises. I pretend that I know everything about how it works just like the TARDIS but, just like claiming to know my own age, is all a bit of hogwash.” 

Dudin thinks she wanted to register surprise but instead her own mouth seemed to take on a life of its own in the reply. And wasn’t the Strand just a little bit brighter than it’d been before?

“Almost as much hogwash as pretending to be a Muslim able to stand next to this one,” she said to her own astonishment as she gestured to Trump. “Or to try and not stare at how small his hands are.” 

Trump’s eyes flew ever wider, as she recalls. “You’re a Muslim!” Dudin remembers the president saying. “But where’s your scarf? You can’t be here. I can’t let you, too many bigly lies about how dangerous you are. And you’re white!”

“We don’t all wear headscarves sir,” Dudin said, putting as much force into that last word as she could. “And I don’t wear one because my father badgered me into wanting to fit in. He wanted me to completely Americanize but I started praying five times a day just to spite him. And white? I’m Chechen just like the Tsarnaev brothers, and don’t think for one second that that sliver of a connection doesn’t terrify me every single day you…” but the irresistible river of truth flowing off Dudin’s mouth suddenly trickled. It took her a long, long moment before the world snapped back into the normal haze from the white-lined intensity that had clung to every inch of her being a moment before.

Dudin looked up to see the Doctor pointing his little device up towards the ceiling, at one of the main sensors used to monitor the Strand, a look of intensity etched into his features. The Doctor stood there, breathing carefully for a long moment before he seemed able to speak again. Dudin thinks both she and the president were still completely without words even as the Doctor regained his. 

“I guess the Soothsis is still misbehaving,” he said, his words shallow with his breathing. “Sorry about that, took me a second to even realize what was happening. And I’m not sure the reversed polarity field I just used your sensor to put up will hold for long if it’s on a burst pattern. Plus, reversing the polarity field is so trite I might have to come up with something else.”

Dudin thinks her mouth was just opening in reply when Trump finally found his own voice. “You fucking lunatics!” the president screamed. “I’m throwing you away forever and I’m blowing this thing up!”

A flash of anger sprang across the Doctor’s voice as he replied. “No you won’t,” he said. “There are better ways to respond than violence and blowing it up would be counterproductive.”

“Enough!” Trump replied. “I’m done listening to you.”

It was in that moment that Dudin caught sight of Trump’s finger, as it tapped furiously at a small device in his hand. She only briefly took it to be a car key, until she realized it was a panic button just as the door to the chamber flew open, armed Styx guards and Secret Service agents rushing in. Each had their weapons up and most were soon pointed at Dudin and the Doctor.

The gunmen started shouting, trying to find out if the president was alright even as they ordered Dudin and the Doctor to get their hands up. After-action reports obtained by the Bugle indicate a complete breakdown in normal order as the two radically different forces tried to assess the situation. Steven Zensk, the head of Styx security, even threatened to bring charges against the Secret Service agents who badly breached protocol by drawing firearms and rushing into a space only 50 people in the world are typically authorized to enter, but his petition appears to have gone nowhere.

All Dudin saw in that moment were the guns. And the madman who refused to raise his arms high above his head as he was commanded. Who just stood there, glowering. 

“You’re liable to do some real damage with those bloody things if you don’t put them away,” he growled with a force and gravity Dudin didn’t think was possible for a human voice, shifting his body to put it between the guns and the Strand. “This is a highly delicate psychic instrument and damaging it could harm the minds of everyone within range, and that’s the entire bloody planet.”

But Trump appears in the moment to have finally, forcefully found his voice. “I’m done listening to you,” the president thundered. “I’m locking you up and I’m ending this thing right now.”

Dudin, her hands still up in the air, tried shouting to match the president. “The Doctor is right sir,” she said. “We don’t know what would happen if we damaged the Strand. We have to study it first.” 

But the armed men were already moving forward and Trump was barking to get someone in the room who could destroy the Strand rather than studying it. Dudin tried objecting, tried to speak up about protocol, but there were armed men between her and any semblance of reason. 

Recollections of what happened next vary sharply. Official records report a major malfunction in the agents’ communications gear, written off by investigators as the unique equipment of the Styx interfering with the normal frequencies employed by the Secret Service. But Dudin tells it differently.

Just as the men were moving in on a glaring Doctor and Dudin, with her hands still held high, an intense shrill burst from the ears of every dark-suited agent in the room. As she tells it, they all dropped their guns with a clatter, their hands jolting up to their ears to tear out the now violently painful earbuds. Dudin suddenly felt another hand in her still out-stretched one, yanking it down and forward in the Doctor’s own forceful grip. She caught sight of the little flashlight in his other hand; it seemed to her eyes to be waving back and forth in the direction of the Secret Service agents’ heads. And then her eyes were caught in his own, impossibly deep ones, for one brief but powerful moment. “Run!” he said.

\--

Dudin ran, as hard as her two-inch heels would carry her. Out the room and down the hallway and around the corner, running with everything she had to keep up with this man whose well-heeled feet seemed to take running as second nature. She recalls the Doctor seemingly expertly navigating their way through the Styx building, somehow timing his movements just so, in order to avoid cameras and patrols and checkpoints. 

Gasping for breath, Dudin kept expecting powerfully safeguarded, impossible-to-crack doors and locks to at least slow the man down. But he’d just wave his glow stick, at controls that Dudin swears a grenade and a master computer hacker couldn’t get past, and they’d simply rush open or at least unlock, without a hint of protest. 

The pair, Dudin is sure, broke some kind of record in getting from the inner heart of the Styx out through a side entrance, just off the breakwaters at the end of the island, that she hadn’t even known existed before that day. The Doctor barely slowed as he plunged across the rocks towards a tall blue box that Dudin was sure someone should have noticed before. And yet somehow, the Styx’s meticulously-kept security logs, including outer patrol sweeps, show nothing of the kind, at least prior to these particular events. 

Dudin recalls trying to protest. She wanted to ask if the Doctor planned on swimming his way off the island. If he knew how far it was to the nearest body of land. But then the man snapped his fingers and the doors to the blue box, a box that should barely be able to fit a single grown man quite snugly, flew open. And suddenly Dudin has only begun to scratch the surface of impossible things from that day.

It’s time again to interject, because what I’m about to describe sounds impossible, even more so than anything else yet identified. But Dudin, a woman whose every other claim has been at least partially corroborated, swears it’s true. And I believe her. I believe Dudin when she describes a tall, narrow blue box opening into a ship beyond. A real ship, with real consoles and controls and space. A ship whose inner dimensions are perhaps millions of times what it appears from beyond its doors. The blue box, Dudin swears, is bigger on the inside.

There wasn’t enough time to gape before the Doctor dragged Dudin inside the impossible blue box. She remembers jumping slightly at the sound of the door closing behind her. And then the hard-metal consoles and many-sided edges of the space were all around her. 

The first chamber you come to, Dudin says, is easily 50 feet across, perfectly circular but with many sides, all arching up to a point at the ceiling, down from which comes a massive center console. At its top, spinning multi-sided shapes, covered in strange symbols the likes of which Dudin had never seen before. At its bottom, a jumble of consoles and controls. All around, cold blue surfaces and doorways beyond, a room that Dudin says could comfortably pass for the central rotunda of a small capitol building on a faraway alien world, the seat of power for a race hundreds or thousands of years beyond our own. 

“This…” Dudin tried to speak as she took it in. But words weren’t coming. 

“Oh come now,” the Doctor prodded, “you know you want to say it.”

“I’m hallucinating,” was her eventual reply. “I passed out from lack of oxygen to my brain from all that running. I’m lying on the floor of a random hallway and my brain is playing images to make up for lack of external stimulus.”

“Well, that’s a new one,” the Doctor said. Dudin noted his hands, and even occasionally his feet, playing across the console controls in the center of the cavernous room, at least four entrances beyond the one they’d come in promising at far more than was here before her eyes. 

“What are you doing?” Dudin asked.

“Trying to get some readings,” the Doctor replied. “Realistically I need more from within the building walls. But I can at least figure out the psychic wave as it left the building. Definitely on the same frequency as the event the other day. But…”

The Doctor frowned, his hands banging slightly at the console. Dudin moved forward, unsure what to do and afraid to touch anything in this room she was still half-certain to be a figment of her imagination. 

“But what?” she finally asked. 

“But much more powerful. On a complete order of magnitude. And I think it would have lasted a lot longer if it weren’t for the temporary inhibitor field I put up.”

Dudin paused to let the words soak in. “Order of magnitude. You think it’s going to happen again. Maybe even keep happening. And getting stronger each time.”

An incomprehensible smile furrowed into the Doctor’s features. “Ah,” he said. “Not just a pretty lab coat.”

Dudin returned the smile with a growl. “Not a pretty lab coat at all,” she said. “A smart one. And you think we’re going to have a worldwide pandemic of violent truth-telling.” 

“It sounds so dire when you put it like that,” the Doctor replied. “But then…”

The Doctor flipped a control and a screen above the console jolted to life. News channels started playing, switching from one to the next, each in a different language that Dudin suddenly found herself understanding. 

The North Korean government was threatening military action against China after the Beijing premier acknowledged in an open communication that the hermit kingdom was an errant and troublesome pest for which China felt responsible. Germany and France were close to sealing off their borders following admissions by both governments that the scars of World War II still haunted their thinking. Hundreds of violent fights had broken out all over the world and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were getting divorced after the latter admitted she never liked or understood her husband’s music.

The world has spent the last six months recovering from the blasts of truth unveiled that day. Still grappling with Iowa Republican Steven King’s open use of the N-word and wondering aloud why people don’t see the upside of the KKK. Still trying to comprehend a statement from former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders expressing admiration for Vladimir Lenin and his lament that hard socialism isn’t palatable in the United States. 

The political bombshells, like Hillary Clinton’s admission of exactly how tightly she’d wound the Democratic party establishment to suit her own ambition, with nigh-criminal backroom deals to prevent serious challengers to her nomination, or Paul Ryan bragging about how many bonus points he’d get from poor people dying under his proposals, are still being processed. Like Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor blasting white people as “dumb redneck crackers.” 

And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the truths told beyond the walls of power. Michael Bay called all women “whores” and “dykes.” Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber and more all started railing about their fans as “fat” and “losers” and “sheep.” Bill Gates called all of humanity “suckers” and bragged about the billions of dollars he still squirrels away for himself, in direct contravention to his promise to donate most of his money to charity.

Dudin knew none of the rest of this in the moment, as she stood in the bridge of the vast blue ship far smaller from the outside. A ship whose name she didn’t even know yet. But that was a secondary consideration. 

“This is going to start a war,” she breathed as she eyed the screen. 

She caught a look of grim determination setting itself into the Doctor’s features. “Not,” he said, “if I have anything to say about it.” 

He hit another few switches and kicked at two more to be rewarded with a strange whirring pulsing through the ship. The sound, and the vibrations, felt to Dudin as if they started from miles beneath her feet. Her skin tickled and her ears rang with the hollowness of it. 

“What the hell is that?” Dudin asked.

“Parking break,” the Doctor said. “Can’t have it rolling down the hill. Parking break and a dampener field that should keep the Soothsis effect localized to within four kilometers, for at least as long as the TARDIS’s power holds.”

“TARDIS?”

“Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Bigger on the inside. But it’s also a ship. And the dampening field it’s putting up should last a solid three hours. It’ll have to be enough.”

Dudin could only stare. “Three hours?”

“The limits of both the field’s energy and the TARDIS. Three hours tops until the effect breaks down. Three hours until I can’t stop the truth-telling effect. And no,” he said, turning to face Dudin directly, “we still can’t destroy it. If that’s what you’re thinking. For all I know the psychic backlash of something so violent would still shatter the dampener field, doing who knows what to the earth, and it’ll all have been for nothing.”

Three hours, Dudin found herself reflecting, is not a lot of time. And if what the Doctor said was right, it was already less than that.

“Even if you could contain the effect to this island, what could you possibly hope to do in three hours?” she recalls saying. “That’s not enough time to talk Trump down, let alone figure out what to do about the Strand.”

But the Doctor merely waved off her protestations with the flick of his wrist. “Bah,” he said. “Three hours is plenty. I’ll have you know I’ve saved the world in 44 minutes or less. And my record is five-and-a-half minutes, no matter what Amy says about that stupid watch.”

Dudin thinks it was the Doctor’s mention of time, and keeping track of it, that made her refer back to the name he’d ascribed to the blue box.

“Time,” she said. “Time and relative dimension in space.”

The Doctor’s eyebrow merely arched up. 

“This,” Dudin breathed, “you’re saying this is a time machine.” 

\--

Months later, Dudin still tries to count the different ways she said the Doctor managed to smile. There was the one looking wry, one bashful, one mischievous. There was another that seemed to live on danger and despair, appearing only at the very worst moments. But this one, she believes, was the broadest.

“Oh I do so love the clever ones,” he declared. 

Dudin blinked, still struggling with a concept even today she has a hard time wrapping her head around, no matter how many times she’s been over it in her head. 

There, in that blue box, Dudin recalls that she wanted to say that Einstein established non-linear time travel’s impossibility. That you can only move forward through time, not sideways or backwards. 

Time travel. It was impossible. Patently ridiculous. She wanted to shout about all the impossible things really, except for the impossible truth-machines and the raging presidents and the boxes that were bigger on the inside. But instead she just gulped down her doubt and plowed forward. 

“Can we,” she said, ever-so-hesitantly, “can we use the TARDIS to fix this?”

But the Doctor shook his head. 

“Fix it how?” he said. “Go back to when the Soothsis came to be here? I’d have to know when that was. All I’ve got is the dampener field and that’s not going to hold up.” He paused for a heartbeat before continuing, his eyes scrutinizing Dudin. “You’ve been studying it?”

Dudin nodded her head.

“Good,” the Doctor said. “And what have you learned?”

“Well…” the Doctor listened intently as Dudin poured out every piece of knowledge she could scrounge from her memory about the blue ribbon, running through every piece of data and knowledge and test on which she believes the U.S. government spent over $20 million in her 3-year tenure alone directly studying the Soothsis. But as she went on she could tell she had nothing that the Doctor needed. 

“You need more, don’t you?” she finally asked.

It was the Doctor’s turn to nod. “I need your readings for starters. Readings I can’t get from here.”

“That means we have to go back into the Styx,” Dudin told him. “I may not be able to get all the data you’d need anywhere but my office, especially if they locked me out.”

Another grin, one of the deep, mischievous ones. Dudin gulped again. “And you need my help,” she said.

“Yes,” the Doctor replied. “But I’d also hate to leave you out of the fun.”

He spun on his heels and sauntered back towards the door. His hand reached out and the door creaked open. A few stray strands of wavy brown hair wafted as his head turned back towards Dudin. “Coming?”

Dudin tucked in her chin into her breastbone, gazing inward and breathing hard for a second. But she knew there was no other real answer. The power of the Soothsis had to be dealt with somehow. And there didn’t seem to be anyone else around to do anything about it. She stepped forward and in another moment was scrambling after the Doctor as they made their way back across the island and towards the giant building that filled their view.

“How do we get in?” Dudin asked the madman half-running beside her. “They’ve probably got an alert out for me. For both of us.”

She caught a look on his face out of the corner of her eye. “I have a piece of paper,” the Doctor said.

“A piece of…” but they were already on the paved airfield and heading towards a door in the distance. Much closer, about 30 yards directly ahead of their path, was a sharp young man in a deep-black uniform and a very large gun. And he was moving purposely towards them.

They stopped in their tracks as the gun bobbed up just enough for the soldier to show it was not merely resting in his arms. “Halt,” came a short bark. Dudin complied. The Doctor followed suit a second later.

The soldier scrutinized them for a second as he approached. “Doctor Dudin?” he said, a quizzical breath edging into the authority.

Dudin nodded. “Yes. And I need you to show us the way into the building.”

There was a second’s hesitation before the reply. But then the full confidence of drilled-in authority returned syllable by syllable. “Ma’am,” the soldier said, “we’re under orders to detain you.”

She opened her mouth to object, to protest that this was her facility and that she knew every snide remark every security guard had ever tossed her way, and even knew the very worst shifts to assign. But the Doctor stirred next to her and the gun moved up another few inches, only for the strange man to wave a leather wallet in the soldier’s face. 

“No need for any of that,” the Doctor said. “I think you’ll find that I am of the highest authority. Of insane time-travelers and lonely gods who play at making the universe a better place only to bring death and self-aggrandizement everywhere I go.”

The soldier quivered and Dudin again felt the urge to pour out her darkest secrets to anyone who would listen. But the Doctor was already there. And he was talking.

“The truth effect is back on, isn’t it?” He said. “Can’t have that. Can’t have me unable to lie about how old I am or bluff my way past how much I make up what I’m doing as I go. I wonder what truth the psychic paper is blaring out right now.” He held up the wallet to his face, talking all the while, about wars and death, misery and destruction. 

What really stood out to Dudin was when the man called himself a wandering plague, who’s cast judgment on men and women, and armies, and whole species, and watched them burn. He made them burn, he said. And she heard the truth in his eyes and heard the pain and finality in his voice. There was so much truth there, in this man revealing himself to be perhaps the greatest mass murderer in the universe. 

Somewhere in there, Dudin recalls, the Doctor started talking about his species; identifying himself not as a human being but something called a Time Lord. Only he didn’t want to lord over anything, he said. He wanted to appreciate life. So he sought out humans, the ones who lived and breathed and could really die. 

“I seek them out, you see,” the Doctor said. Dudin’s own words choke as she tries to convey the depth of sadness boring down her ears in that moment as the Doctor spoke. 

“I need to see them for all their brief, frail beauty, living in moments that whisk by me in what seems like the space between twin heartbeats. They live and they die and I go on,” he said. “They don’t know the infinite and I don’t know the finite, so I carry them along with me, to be reminded that most the universe is mortal. That people really do die when I can’t save them. I watch them, like lab rats moving through the maze of time.”

Dudin watched as the scrawl on the piece of paper actually started to move under the Doctor’s gaze. It was telling so much and her eyes struggled to keep up with the words, full of names and places, details that the Doctor was now illustrating aloud. “Killed, killed, missing in a temporal vortex, turned into a really ugly alien, turned into a less ugly alien, lost in time because I’m too insistent in my need for my own misery and guilt to go after her,” he said. But then his voice changed and he gasped for breath, hastily thrusting the wallet into the depths of his coat. 

The strange man in the bow tie made a sound, his whole body quivering as the three of them stood on that windswept runway. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry about that. I guess the Soothsis is back to misbehaving again.” 

He looked up at the gun still pointed in his general direction. “Are you still here?” he asked the soldier. All he got was a faint nod in response. “And are you still planning to shoot me?” This time a shake of the head from side to side. “Excellent. I guess that means even the truth can work sometimes.”

The Doctor stepped forward. The soldier slowly lowered his gun and the man in the brown jacket turned back to Dudin. She nodded before he could speak, and they were again moving toward the giant gray block. 

She looked back once for the young man as they came up on the door. He was still there, staring off into the long blue wall stretching out in every direction. But she had to get inside. They could both process later. 

Dudin says she knows the Styx better than nearly anyone alive. At the time of the incident, she’d run the facility for over two-and-a-half years and had been posted there for 18, nearly straight out of her last PhD program. But that day, in those hours, she swears the building felt different. A place of science and bureaucracy, discovery and rules, oozed instead with hostility and violence, seething with barely-bottled anger. And it looked different at points as well, with a few broken windows and even splotches of blood, red and drying on the walls. 

Only three incidents of violence — two between old friends apparently caught in separate love triangles, and one more over an ancient family recipe that apparently no one actually liked to eat — are recorded in the Styx logs that day. But Dudin is sure she saw signs of more. How much violence would have been spilled beyond the island if not for the bubble the Doctor put up, is anyone’s guess. 

They were only challenged a few times. Red-faced men, mostly, but also a few women, would wave a rifle in their general direction. “Halt,” they’d say, only for the Doctor to get increasingly irritated with new encounter. “Oy!” he said at one point. “Enough with the guns!” But each time they’d get challenged, the Doctor would wave his wallet around.

This time, within the walls of the Styx, what the Doctor identified to Dudin as “slightly psychic paper” worked far more effectively, the soldiers stammering out a reply, snapping out a hasty salute, and allowing them to keep moving, staring at Dudin all the while as the pair of intruders kept winding their way through the building. 

With about two hours left to go until the bubble came down for good, they reached the hard oak exterior that marked Dudin’s office.

Dudin reached for her ID to swipe the pair in but the Doctor caught her arm. “I doubt that’ll work,” he said. “But this might.” He waved his little device at the console controlling the door and after a brief moment, it buzzed and a “click” sounded as the door unlocked, with nary a hint of protest. 

The Doctor reached out to the door for a second before stopping and turning back to Dudin. “This is your office?” he asked. She nodded. “Well then, you first.”

Dudin brushed past the Doctor and pushed inside, the Doctor on her heels. And Donald Trump in her face. 

“You!” Trump thundered, a handful of White House and Styx staffers surrounding the heavy wooden table Dudin keeps in the center of her office, Trump looking on. 

“Of course! how could I have been so stupid,” the Doctor said with another snap of his fingers. “It’s so obvious. You’re the rodeo clown who ran for… governor? No. No, no no. Oh I know I know you from somewhere, but I just can’t put my finger on it.”

Dudin stepped forward before the Doctor could continue or Trump could respond. “We’re here to help,” she blurted out with all the force she could muster. “You can shoot me or you can throw us out. But we want to stop this just as much as you do. We can’t let this go on.”

Trump glowered at the pair but one of the other Styx staffers spoke up.

“We… we can’t damage it.”

Dudin is not sure which reaction was harsher in that moment, the white of the Doctor’s clenched fists or the growl in his voice. “Well of course you can’t damage it you stupid humans!” he belted out. “It’s a thousand-year old stream of psychic energy. And I’ll just bet you tried to shoot it.”

“It was his idea,” the staffer said, waving at Trump. 

“I would have expected more from an up-and-coming pianist,” the Doctor said. “But then you have the wrong hands.”

The strange man marched forward, his voice, Dudin recalls, somehow instantly commanding obedience from the staffers he ordered to step back from the table. “Anna, if you would be so kind,” he said, waving Dudin forward.

It took Dudin a moment to respond, a moment enough for Trump to again raise his voice. “This is unacceptable,” the president thundered. 

Dudin stepped towards him before Trump could say anything more. “Please sir,” she said, putting as much solace into her voice as she could muster. “We’ve already seen what this thing does to the people on this island. Do you want that to continue?”

Trump stared at her. “I… keep wanting to say things,” he managed. 

Dudin nodded. “I know. So do we. But if you let us, I know we can stop it. Without further violence.”

“Well, maybe a little violence,” the Doctor said. Dudin turned to him, trying to study the look of the man as his hands blurred through the stack of papers—blueprints, analyses, memos—covering her desk and spelling out everything they’d ever managed to learn about the Strand.

“Doctor?” she asked.

“Think of it like a music box,” the Doctor said without ever looking up, “and music boxes keep playing and playing and playing. Until?”

Dudin studied his face, trying to peer into a mind she’s still perplexed by. “Until you close the lid,” she told him.

Another smile. “Exactly. And we need to stop playing its tune.”

Dudin followed a finger jabbed into one of the haphazardly-strewn pieces of paper. “That’s the study we did on how the Strand reacted to energy discharges in its vicinity,” she told him at a glance.

“And what did you find?” the Doctor asked.

Dudin frowned. “Nothing,” she said. “No notable reactions to gamma, infrared, x-ray or pretty much any other kind of radiation.”

There was a shake of the tousled head. One of the few Dudin recalls seeing from the Doctor. “Humans,” he said. “Always with the radiation. Why so obsessed with glowing in the dark?”

“You have some other kind of energy in mind?”

The smile returned. “What kind of energy do you use to shut the music box?”

Dudin returned his smile with a frown. “Well… kinetic. But you were just excoriating anyone for thinking about shooting it or blowing it up.”

“That’s because I don’t want to shoot it,” the Doctor said. “Shooting it never does anything. Except maybe if you jump really, really high.”

\--

It took nearly an hour to assemble all the parts the Doctor demanded for the Strand room. Trump complained all the while, especially as the Doctor still occasionally voiced various guesses as to who the president was — Dudin swears she thinks this madman genuinely didn’t know. 

When he wasn’t jumping from guesses that included racecar driver, televangelist, famous bible salesman, and gameshow contestant, Dudin says, the Doctor was giving orders. She recalls him running from one end of the line of workers to the other, snapping fingers and directing items be moved “to the left, no the other left, well that first left and then backwards.”

But eventually, four large movable walls were aligned at points along a 100-yard stretch at the center of the Strand; a mix of coils, wires and special metals arranged in, on and around the structures to the Doctor’s exact specifications. The Doctor tried several times to explain his plan, but even Dudin says she was baffled: there was something about cosmic waveform entanglements that would sever the link to the psychosphere at the exact right frequency needed to cancel out the truth affect. 

“Do you really think this will work?” Dudin asked when the walls were finally assembled and aligned along the glowing ribbon. 

The Doctor didn’t answer, she says. He just bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, a palpable excitement gripping his features. The strange man waved his hands through the air again, a maestro conducting the maddest ensemble orchestra anyone has ever seen. 

“On my count,” the Doctor announced aloud, “push the exo-inhibitors into place and block the Soothsis.”

Dudin nodded to the men arrayed around the makeshift walls, all baffled by a room that until that day had been little more than myth to more than 90 percent of the denizens of the Styx. Each man stepped forward and positioned both hands on the nearest wall, easing their bodies into readiness.

The Doctor breathed a moment before continuing. “Excellent, just like honeybees. Except without the honey, unless you’re Varician storm bees. Forget lightning in a bottle, you really have to try it out of the stinger.” No one had a moment to process his words, because the next ones were a barked order to push. And so the men did, sliding the walls forward to block the Strand, and according to the Doctor, cap the music box. 

By accounts, the walls worked for between 10 and 15 seconds, the blue of the Strand wobbling in the air as the Doctor’s contraptions seemed to block the continuous line. But then one man on the line started talking. And then another. And another. Until each was running a stream of conscious truth, a babble of dark secrets of cheated tests and pregnant mistresses, childhood traumas and at least one sexual assault, pouring out for everyone who could hear. 

I tried several times to get Dudin and others to recall what it was Trump himself disclosed. But anyone within earshot of the president refused. What they describe instead is the chaos and violence of the room as old friends started throwing punches over sleights large and small. Records from the tussle count 17 broken bones, 23 contusions, and a collective 139 stitches, despite the fact that the entire ruckus was over within 90 seconds of its start. 

It’s difficult to think, let alone shout out your darkest secrets, Dudin says, when a magnified roar of “Quiet!” reverberates through the room. Dudin recalls clapping her hands to her ears and looking up to find the Doctor holding his little device to his throat, his veins bulging and his skin stretched taught as he fought as much to control himself as the room.

“You want the truth?” the Doctor barked, his voice now modulated far lower than its original boom but still loud enough to drown out everything else in the room. “The truth is I live on fear that my lies will catch up to me. That death will come for me and after all this time, after cheating it and feeding it and fighting it, after all that, I still won’t have the courage to look it in the eye.”

The Doctor marched forward, issuing to Dudin what seemed like a challenge aimed straight at the Strand. “The truth,” the Doctor continued, “is that I need to lie. We all do. Because lies are comforting. Lies give us story and purpose and not the cold-reality of the heat death of the universe. And you need to accept that.” 

Dudin says it took her a long moment to realize the Doctor really was talking directly to the Strand. Each step, she says, seemed to take more out of this man. But he kept walking. And he kept talking.

“I’m not even sure how many lies I have to unearth,” the Doctor continued. “I’ve told so many over the centuries, from constantly lying about my age to telling people I’m fine when all I want to do is get in my TARDIS and run. And then sometimes I do. I just get in and I run and I don’t look back at all the people I’ve left behind and all the people I always knew I couldn’t save. I figure my track record is about one chance in four to actually save the people I try to help, and the chances of survival drop to about 18.49 percent, well really 18.2 percent, when I actively promise to save them.”

The Doctor stumbled, his breath becoming more and more shallow as he moved towards the line of energy now just a few feet from his fingertips. But he never stopped talking, Dudin says, not once, apparently forcing himself to take up all the oxygen, and all the room for truth, that the room had to spare. 

“But I need those lies,” the Doctor said. “I really do. And the people I promise to save need to hear them. Because at my worst, at least I can bring hope. And what do you bring?”

The answer, Dudin said, was little more than a hum. But it was a profound noise filling every inch of the space and seeping into every pore of her body, sounding through skin and muscle and boring into bone. But despite the force of the hum, the message was still somehow the clearest thing she’d ever heard, not a whisper or even a voice in her head, but a piece of absolute proclamation etched into the air around her.

I bring truth, was the answer, and every person in that room who agreed to talk to me agrees: the answer came from the Soothsis itself.

“Oh look who joined the party!” the Doctor replied, his arms waving through the air at the Strand and around the room. “And without a proper gift. Very rude that. You should at least have brought fish fingers and custard—somehow not even my weirdest habit. But I was wondering how much it would take to get you to answer.”

The Doctor jabbed his little device outward toward the Strand. “I wish I could bluff you into thinking I could hurt you,” he said. “Really I do. But I don’t think a weapon exists to hurt a being of pure truth. And you are a being, aren’t you?”

I exist, came the reply.

“Well of course you exist! Rocks and trees and clouds exist, don’t they? Unless I’m bringing that up with some fancy wordplay to distract everyone while I figure out what I’m really doing. Because I’m not as fast as I pretend, not in my head,” the Doctor said. “I fill the empty space with words. And that’s what you do, isn’t it? You fill the empty spaces with truth, and after all the centuries of lies and truths and half-truth lies, you heard so much, you grew and fed off the psychic, emotional and radiation energy these humans have been pumping out, and you became aware. You became something that doesn’t just compel the truth when forced but you decided you just wanted to make truth.”

I make nothing.

“And yet I’m able to say you do,” the Doctor said, puffing out his chest with a forceful heave and, Dudin thinks, a measure of triumph worming its way back in his voice. “That means it’s not a lie. But the bigger truth is the chaos that you bring.”

Only truth. All else is fabrication. 

The Doctor laughed. Chortled really, Dudin says. The madman swiped his hand through the air, batting away a fly or a choice of words he didn’t like.

“I… damn I can’t say you’re a liar. Why can’t I say you’re a liar? It’s like not being able to say ‘conundrum’ when you’re in a phone booth and we know how important that is. Although no one who’s ever travelled in time thinks it’s so precise and linear to be confined to seven days.”

Another laugh from the Doctor even as he stumbled under the strain of the energy in the room. But his mouth never really stopped working. Not once.

“But we’re not comparing time-travel notes,” he said. “We’re talking truth. There is a truth in here, a real one, and we both know that. Your truth? It brings about the chaos. And that’s damn well close enough to bringing it directly. Look at the violence it’s incited,” he said, waving his arm more forcefully to sweep around the room of bloodied noses and swollen eye sockets. 

“The truth effect you brought on did this. Or am I lying?”

Truth is necessary. Lies are a distraction.

At this the Doctor folded his arms. “Said someone who’s never been asked, ‘does this make me look fat?’ Or been asked if this really is a good idea. Or if people like you. Well of course it’s not a good idea. And no one likes you. But no one wants to hear that. It’s not useful. It’s not useful to be told all the ways a blue box that can go anywhere and anywhen can help people because I can’t stop running long enough to figure it out. And you can’t stop long enough to just listen to what you’ve done. Or have you?”

I hear every truth.

“Then hear the truth of cracking bone and cut-up flesh,” the Doctor retorted. “Or can’t you hear it? Couldn’t you hear when that truth-wave of yours last spread beyond this island? Violence is its own kind of truth. And you heard every little syllable of it, every cocked rifle and cracked knuckle of a planet ready to devour itself. All because you couldn’t stand a few white lies and a lot of big black ones.”

For a moment there was no answer, just a hum without meaning, the blue glow twisting through the air under the Doctor’s gaze. He appeared not to have the patience to wait. “Answer me!” the Doctor demanded. “Tell me you don’t feel all the truth of the anger out there. Tell me you don’t see the difference in the calmness of the lies that came before you opened the floodgates.”

Is placidity really better?

The Doctor raised his arms high above his head, his mouth open wide.

“Of course it is!” he shouted. “When it’s not covering up turmoil ready to blow over and not concealing hidden agendas, and even sometimes when it is, because lies give us cover when we damn well know how much worse the truth would be.”

Another long pause as the Strand seemed to be mulling the Doctor’s words.

You’d have the lies return.

The Doctor merely nodded.

And what of me?

The Doctor cleared his throat. “I can help you with that. Especially if you want to leave a place of such profound lies. And believe me, these humans are certainly far worse when it comes to lies than almost any other race, but somehow they’re also some of the least-skilled liars. Interesting paradox but not one you need concern yourself with. And from what I can tell, this decade had some of the most egregious lying of a nearly thousand-year period.”

Leave?

The Doctor, Dudin says, relaxed slightly for the first time in that moment, after long minutes of tensing himself up in coiled energy. He started to talk a little more calmly, telling the Soothsis about his TARDIS, its ability to travel through time and space and his ability to take it to any place, any time that it might want to go. Even the size of the Soothsis would be of no consequence, he said.

There was another long pause before the humming response came again. 

The lies will return.

Another nod from the Doctor.

“The lies always come back,” he responded. “There’s always more lies. But there’re always little pieces of truth filtering through too. And sometimes both cause violence. But there will be a pattern to it. The predictable ebb and flow of untruths and full-truths as they fight to control the story.”

And that will be better?

“It will,” the Doctor said. “I’ve been lying for hundreds of years and… well I wish I could say it’s never gotten me in trouble. But I know it’s helped too. And I think it’s even stopped a few wars in their tracks.”

The Strand’s final assent, according to Dudin, wasn’t a translatable word. This hum she instead describes as a profound agreement, deeper than a yes and more powerful than ‘very well.’

The rest, Dudin says, was uneventful. The Doctor named a planet the Soothsis might like, with a name Dudin still can’t wrap her tongue around. The residents there, the Doctor promised, were virtually the exact opposite of the Soothsen, a race of aliens for whom lies were profoundly rude. 

Ultimately, the Soothsis agreed and in a few minutes after the Doctor marched out, everyone else still licking wounds and nursing throbbing heads, a wheezing noise the likes of which Dudin still can’t quite describe filled the room. The blue box slowly faded from nothing, right in the middle of the room, and once materialized, the door creaked open and from inside appeared a nearly giddy Doctor, beckoning the Soothsis to join him. 

\--

The Soothsis’ homecoming, Dudin says the Doctor told her, was a 4,000 lightyear roundtrip. The TARDIS was gone less than 90 seconds.

“Sorry it took me so long,” the Doctor said as he popped out of his blue box. “Had to find the right parking spot. And process being taken up on my offer to relocate — that never works. Everyone ok on this end?”

Dudin nodded. Medics had by that point started to filter into the room and the two men inside who couldn’t walk on their own had already been carried out. But she also had a question for this madman.

“You told everyone to leave their weapons outside,” she said.

“I did.”

“Then, you knew this would happen.”

The Doctor shrugged. “Seemed like it. Although my plans usually go far more poorly. I guess I should be forced to tell the truth more often. Like still not being able to figure out this one,” he said, a thumb jerked in Trump’s direction. “It’s why I came back at all.”

Trump, silent since the last burst of truth and violence, finally roared back to life.

“I am the president of the United States!” he thundered.

The Doctor could only blink as he took in the revelation. And then he snapped his fingers again and spun on his heels. “Oh, of course!” he finally said. “I always knew I should pay attention to the footnotes.”

“Footnote?” Trump said, “I’m an historic president, I will put this country on track and history will thank me for it.”

But the Doctor could only shake his head. 

“There’s a lot of earth history, mind you,” he said. “But the only two times I’ve ever seen you mentioned, it’s always in a footnote. And I don’t think anyone can even remember why.”


End file.
